Lately I'm running into quite some negative atmosphere in meetings. Raise your hand if you think we all should improve our soft skills.

For example, we had a meeting with our client the other day. It was supposed to be only with the two most senior guys in the team and a couple of the less senior (just because one of us knows better the maths of it and the other one knows better about the limitations of the hardware), but in the end some other team members also joined.

In this meeting, we wanted to discuss an issue that had to be fixed. Quite a complex one. The main speaker from the clients, even though also technical, was having a hard time trying to explain properly to us what the issue was about. He was doing quite well, but it was complex enough. Well, one of the guys in my team kept interrupting him to ask very detailed questions (that would not help us understand it better, not until we got first the big picture). When I say "interrupting" I mean that the guy would half shout a question in the middle of a word from the client.

The client was patient and tried to answer, but our nice guy would keep answering back in a "gosh you really don't have a clue" tone.

We muted our microphone and one of the senior Devs asked the guy to please let them conduct the meeting, and that if he had such questions, he could mute the micro and ask them to us, so we knew we might have to ask about that.

Good. We unmute the microphone and 2 minutes after, our star guy goes in again and he even directs his question to someone else than who was talking (from the client).

Client gets pissed - I mean, I taught 12-16 year old teenagers for years and I don't think I would have hold it together for as long as the client did - and from then on all the meeting went in a really negative tone. Ending up with a call from the client to our senior guy to finish explaining in private the thing.

Well, our friend the interrupting guy not only got amazingly mad at the senior guy that (in private and constructively) gave him some advice on this kind of meetings. No, he also ended up spiraling into a close to insulting chain of emails towards the client -with his and our colleagues in copy- when he needed some specification.

Interrupting guy is 35yo and has been working with clients quite long. Our HR department still doesn't think we all should get communication workshops or something